Furious 7
Furious 7 (often stylized as Furious Seven and alternatively known as Fast 7 and Fast & Furious 7) is a 2015 American action film directed by James Wan and written by Chris Morgan. It is the seventh installment in ''The Fast and the Furious'' franchise. The film stars Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris Bridges, Jordana Brewster, Djimon Hounsou, Kurt Russell and Jason Statham. Furious 7 follows Dominic Toretto (Diesel), Brian O'Conner (Walker) and the rest of their team, who have returned to the United States to live normal lives after securing amnesty for their past crimes in Fast & Furious 6 (2013), until Deckard Shaw (Statham), a rogue special forces assassin seeking to avenge his comatose younger brother, puts the team in danger once again. With the previous three installments set between 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), Furious 7 is the first installment in the franchise to take place after Tokyo Drift. The film also marks the final film appearance of Walker, who died in a single-vehicle crash on November 30, 2013, with filming only half-completed. Following Walker's death, filming was delayed for script rewrites, and his brothers, Caleb and Cody, were used as stand-ins to complete his remaining scenes. Plans for a seventh installment were first announced in February 2012 when Johnson stated that production on the film would begin after the completion of Fast & Furious 6. In April 2013, Wan, predominantly known for horror films, was announced to direct the film in place of Justin Lin, who left the franchise after directing the previous four installments. Casting began in the same month with the re-signing of Diesel and Walker, and an initial release date was set. Principal photography began in Atlanta, Georgia, in September 2013, resumed in April 2014 and ended in July 2014, with other filming locations including Los Angeles, Colorado, Abu Dhabi, and Tokyo. Furious 7 premiered in Los Angeles on April 1, 2015, and was first released in Australia on April 2, 2015, and then in the United States on April 3, 2015. The film was also released in 3D, IMAX 3D, and 4DX internationally. Upon release, the film became a critical and commercial success, with praise being aimed at the film's action sequences and its tribute to Walker. The film grossed $397.6 million worldwide in its first five days of release, which is the fifth highest-grossing opening of all time. The film has grossed over $1.5 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film in the franchise after just twelve days, the third highest-grossing film of 2015 and the sixth highest-grossing film of all time. A sequel, The Fate of the Furious, is scheduled to be released on April 14, 2017. Plot After defeating Owen Shaw and his crew and securing amnesty for their past crimes, Dominic "Dom" Toretto, Brian O'Conner and the rest of their team have returned to the United States to live normal lives again. Brian begins to accustom himself to life as a father, while Dom tries to help Letty Ortiz regain her memory. Meanwhile, Owen's older brother, Deckard Shaw, breaks into the secure hospital the comatose Owen is being held in and swears vengeance against Dom, before breaking into Luke Hobbs' DSS office to extract profiles of Dom's crew. After revealing his identity, Shaw engages Hobbs in a fight, and escapes when he detonates a bomb that severely injures Hobbs. Dom later learns from his sister Mia that she is pregnant again and convinces her to tell Brian. However, a bomb, disguised in a package sent from Tokyo, explodes and destroys the Toretto house just seconds after Han, a member of Dom's team, is killed by Shaw in Tokyo. Dom later visits Hobbs in a hospital, where he learns that Shaw is a rogue special forces assassin seeking to avenge his brother. Dom then travels to Tokyo to claim Han's body, and meets and races Sean Boswell, a friend of Han's who gives him personal items found at Han's crash site. Back at Han's funeral in Los Angeles, Dom notices a car observing them, and after a chase, confronts its driver, who is revealed to be Shaw. Both prepare to fight, but Shaw flees when a covert ops team arrives and opens fire. The team is led by a man who calls himself Mr. Nobody, who says that he will assist Dom in stopping Shaw if he helps him obtain the God's Eye, a computer program that uses digital devices to track down a person, and save its creator, a hacker named Ramsey, from a mercenary named Mose Jakande. Dom, Brian, Letty, Roman Pearce, and Tej Parker then airdrop their cars over the Caucasus Mountains in Azerbaijan, ambush Jakande's convoy, and rescue Ramsey. The team then heads to Abu Dhabi, where a billionaire has acquired the flash drive containing the God's Eye, and manages to steal it from the owner. With the God's Eye near telecommunications repeaters, the team tracks down Shaw, who is waiting at a remote factory. Dom, Brian, Mr. Nobody and his team attempt to capture Shaw, but are ambushed by Jakande and his men, and are forced to flee while Jakande obtains the God's Eye. At his own request, the injured Mr. Nobody is then left behind to be evacuated by helicopter while Brian and Dom continue without him. Left with no other choice, the crew returns to Los Angeles to fight Shaw, Jakande, and his men. Meanwhile, Brian promises Mia that once they deal with Shaw, he will dedicate himself entirely to their family. While Jakande pursues Brian and the rest of the team with a stealth helicopter and an aerial drone, Ramsey attempts to hack into the God's Eye. Hobbs, seeing the team in trouble, leaves the hospital and destroys the drone with an ambulance. Ramsey then regains control of the God's Eye and shuts it down. Meanwhile, Dom and Shaw engage in a one-on-one brawl on a parking garage, before Jakande intervenes and attacks them both. Shaw is defeated when part of the parking garage collapses beneath him. Dom then launches his vehicle at Jakande's helicopter, tossing Shaw's bag of grenades onto its skids, before injuring himself when his car lands and crashes. Hobbs then shoots the bag of grenades from ground level, destroying the helicopter and killing Jakande. Dom is pulled from the wreckage of his car, believed dead. As Letty cradles Dom's body in her arms, she reveals that she has regained her memories, and that she remembers their wedding. Dom regains consciousness soon after, remarking, "It's about time". Shaw is taken into custody by Hobbs and locked away in a secret, high-security prison, 32 meters underground. At a beach, Brian and Mia play with their son while Dom, Letty, Roman, Tej and Ramsey observe, acknowledging that Brian is better off retired with his family. Dom silently leaves, but Brian catches up with him at a crossroad. As Dom remembers the times that he had with Brian, they bid each other farewell and drive off in separate directions. Cast , who died in a car accident on November 30, 2013. The film was dedicated to his memory.]] * Vin Diesel as Dominic Toretto, a former criminal and professional street racer who has retired and settled down with his wife, Letty. * Paul Walker as Brian O'Conner, a former FBI agent turned criminal and professional street racer who has retired and settled down with his partner, Mia, and their son, Jack. ** Caleb and Cody Walker, Paul's younger brothers, were used among others as Stand-Ins to complete his remaining scenes following their brother's death in a single-vehicle crash on November 30, 2013. * Dwayne Johnson as Luke Hobbs, a DSS agent who allied with Dom and his team after their outings in Rio de Janeiro and Europe. It is later revealed that he is also a father, to a young girl. Johnson initially said that if Universal Pictures pursued the accelerated development of a seventh film beginning in the summer, he would be unable to participate due to scheduling conflicts with filming on Hercules. However, as production for the film would commence in September, he confirmed his return for the film, as Hercules would complete production in time to enable him to film a significant part. * Michelle Rodriguez as Letty Ortiz, Dom's wife and a professional street racer, who was revealed to have suffered from amnesia after being presumed dead in Fast & Furious. * Tyrese Gibson as Roman Pearce, a member of Dom's team and a childhood friend of Brian. * Chris Bridges as Tej Parker, a mechanic and technician, and a friend of Brian and Roman's from Miami. * Jordana Brewster as Mia Toretto, Dom's younger sister and a former member of his team who has settled down with her partner, Brian, and their son, Jack. * Djimon Hounsou as Mose Jakande, a Somalian mercenary and terrorist who leads a private military company that allies with Shaw and uses the God's Eye to track its creator and use her to track down his enemies. * Tony Jaa as Kiet, a member of Jakande's team who possesses great agility, athleticism and fighting prowess. Thai martial arts actor Jaa was confirmed to have joined the cast in August 2013, making his Hollywood debut. s Tony Jaa Joins Fast and Furious 7|last=Collura|first=Scott|work=IGN.com|date=August 23, 2013 |accessdate=August 24, 2013}} * Ronda Rousey as Kara, the Head of Security for an Abu Dhabi billionaire. Rousey's involvement was confirmed in August 2013. Having committed to The Expendables 3 at the same time (along with Russell, who later pulled out, and Statham), Rousey was forced to shoot both films back-to-back in order to allow herself 45 days to focus on training for her UFC championship rematch against Miesha Tate. Her participation in the film was similar to that of Gina Carano making the transition from mixed martial arts fighting to acting, following Carano's involvement in Fast & Furious 6. * Nathalie Emmanuel as Ramsey, a British computer hacktivist and the creator of the God's Eye, who allies with Dom and his team after being saved from Jakande and helps them to regain control of her program. * Kurt Russell as Mr. Nobody, the leader of a covert ops team who agrees to help Dom stop Shaw if he can help him prevent Jakande from obtaining a computer program called the God's Eye. * Jason Statham as Deckard Shaw, a rogue special forces assassin seeking to avenge his comatose younger brother after his demise at the hands of Dom and his team in Spain. * Sung Kang as Han, a member in Dominic's crew, appearing in archive footage. * Gal Gadot as Gisele, a member in Dominic's crew, appearing in archive footage. * Lucas Black as Sean Boswell, an American street racer who lives in Tokyo whom Dom meets when he travels to Tokyo to claim the body of Han, a mutual friend of theirs killed by Shaw. In September, it was confirmed that Black had signed on to reprise his role as Boswell for Furious 7 and two more installments. * Elsa Pataky as Elena Neves, a DSS agent and former Rio police officer who moved to the United States to become Hobbs' new partner at the DSS. * Noel Gugliemi as Hector, a street race organizer, reprising his role from the first film. * John Brotherton as Sheppard, Mr. Nobody's right-hand man. * Ali Fazal plays Safar, a friend of Ramsey to whom she sent the God's Eye for safekeeping. It is Fazal's first appearance in an American film. He described his role as a cameo. * Luke Evans briefly reprises his role from the previous film as Owen Shaw, the comatose younger brother of the film's primary antagonist. * Australian rapper Iggy Azalea makes a cameo appearance as a Race Wars fan and a female racer; she contributed to the soundtrack. http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-shop/6523987/iggy-azalea-furious-7-line American singer-rapper T-Pain appears as himself as he DJs a party in Abu Dhabi. http://www.sbnation.com/2015/3/20/8262069/fast-furious-7-movie-review Klement Tinaj cameos as a Race Wars Racer. * Bow Wow and Nathalie Kelley appear in archive footage from The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift as Twinkie and Neela, respectively. Tego Calderón and Don Omar appear as Leo and Santos, respectively, in archive footage from Fast Five. Production Development On October 21, 2011, the Los Angeles Times reported that Universal Studios was considering filming two sequels—''Fast Six'' and Fast Seven—back-to-back with a single storyline running through both films. Both would be written by Chris Morgan and directed by Justin Lin, who had been the franchise's writer and director, respectively, since The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006). On December 20, 2011, following the release of Fast Five, Vin Diesel stated that Fast Six would be split into two parts, with writing for the two films occurring simultaneously. On the decision, Diesel said: We have to pay off this story, we have to service all of these character relationships, and when we started mapping all that out it just went beyond 110 pages ... The studio said, 'You can't fit all that story in one damn movie!' However, in an interview on February 15, 2012, Dwayne Johnson stated that the two intended sequels would no longer be filmed simultaneously because of weather issues in filming locations, and that production on Fast Seven would only begin after the completion of Fast Six. In April 2013, during post-production of the retitled Fast & Furious 6, Lin announced that he would not return to direct a seventh film, as the studio wanted to produce the film on an accelerated schedule for release in summer 2014. This would have required Lin to begin pre-production on the sequel while performing post-production on Fast & Furious 6, which he considered would affect the quality of the final product. Despite the usual two-year gap between the previous installments, Universal chose to pursue a sequel quicker due to having fewer reliable franchises than its competitor studios. However, subsequent interviews with Lin have suggested that the sixth film was always intended to be the final installment under his direction. In April 2013, Australian director James Wan, predominantly known for horror films, was announced as the sequel's director, with Neal H. Moritz and Michael Fottrell returning to produce and Morgan returning to write the script, his fifth in the franchise. On April 16, 2013, Diesel announced that the sequel would be released on July 11, 2014. In May 2013, Diesel said that the sequel would feature Los Angeles, Tokyo and the Middle East as locations. Filming Principal photography began in early September 2013 in Atlanta, Georgia, with a casting call issued. Abu Dhabi was also a filming location; the production crew chose it over Dubai, as they would benefit from the Emirate's 30% rebate scheme. Pikes Peak Highway in Colorado was closed in September to film some driving sequences. On September 16, the production filmed with Paul Walker and the Kimsey twins, playing his son, Jack, in front of an Atlanta elementary school. Han's funeral scene was filmed at Oakland Cemetery, with extras needed for the scene being "hot, hip and trendy cool types of all ethnicities between the ages of 18 and 45". On the evening of September 19, Lucas Black joined the production for his sole scene with Diesel, in an Atlanta parking garage. Separate scenes with Walker also shot in the same location on the same night, including one half of a phone conversation between his character and Jordana Brewster's. The day after, Diesel posted a picture from the night shoot with Black on his Facebook page. On October 24, over a month into the film's production, Johnson tweeted he had started shooting for the film after wrapping up on Hercules. Five days later, Diesel posted the first photo of Johnson on the set, in the hospital scene. On November 30, 2013, while on a break for the Thanksgiving holiday, Walker, who portrayed Brian O'Conner, died in a single-vehicle accident. The next day, Universal announced that production would continue after a delay that would allow the filmmakers to rework the film. On December 4, 2013, Universal put production on hold indefinitely. Wan later confirmed that the film had not been cancelled. On December 22, 2013, Diesel announced on his Facebook page that the film would be released on April 10, 2015. On February 27, 2014, The Hollywood Reporter reported that filming would resume on April 1, and that the cast and crew had headed to Atlanta to prepare for about eight more weeks of shooting. Principal photography ended on July 10, 2014. Stunts was used in the film to carry the vehicles that would drop from 12,000 feet high, above the Sonoran Desert, making cars plummet at a speed of about 130 to 140 miles per hour. ]] The "air drop" sequence was conceived by stunt coordinator, Spiro Razatos, who also supervised on the franchise's two previous installments; ''Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6. Razatos told Business Insider that he wanted to rely more on real stunts rather than CGI because he wanted the whole sequence to "feel real" and fulfill audience's expectations. The stunt took months of prep-solving problems. Cameras needed to be mounted onto cars in a way that they would not be destroyed when the cars landed, and the crew had to figure out a safe way to get the cars out of the plane. They performed a dry run with a single car falling out of a plane and did this six times. Cars were dropped from a Lockheed C-130 Hercules high above the Arizona desert, but close up shots that show the cars landing on a mountain road were filmed in Colorado. There were two airplanes, flying at a height of 12,000 feet, each dropping two cars apiece. BRS parachutes enabled with GPS were secured to each of the cars before dropping off the C-130 plane. At about 5,000 feet, the parachutes deployed. Over 10 cameras were used for the sequence. In addition to cameras on the ground, there were cameras remotely operated inside the plane and another three mounted outside each car. Additional cameras were on a helicopter, where Razatos was stationed watching monitors. Three skydivers used in the shoot wore helmet cameras to help shoot the sequence from multiple angles. Sky divers would either jump out before cars or after them. While all the cars landed on their drop zones, 70% landed perfectly and 30% didn't. For the close-up scenes which shows the actors inside their cars, a giant gimbal with a 360-degree range of movement were attached to each of the cars and was filmed against a green screen to reproduce their tumble through the sky. The last part of the scene, which shows the cars hitting the road was shot separately. To get that right, the team set up a pully system that had cars six to ten feet above the ground. When they were dropped from the cranes, the stuntmen who were sitting in the driver's seats raced their engines at about 35 to 40 miles per hour and slid to the ground at full speed. Those cranes were then later removed from the film with computers. Razatos admits that the air drop sequence was "all real" and that it would be "hard to top". The scene featuring Brian jumping off a bus off a cliff was performed by a stuntman and was all done without any computer graphics. The shooting for this particular sequence along with the scene in which Dom and his team are pursuing to rescue Ramsey almost didn't happen due to the absence of tax break in Colorado. The studio originally wanted to shoot the sequence in Georgia which provides tax breaks for film productions, and then they'd add woods in the background later in post production to which Razatos denied saying, "the audience is going to know CGI and aren't going to feel good about it." Shooting finally took place in Colorado. A total of 340 cars were used in the film, and more than 230 cars were destroyed in the making of the film including several black Mercedes-Benz, a Ford Crown Victoria and a Mitsubishi Montero. The mountain-highway chase scene on Colorado's Monarch Pass proved to be the most damaging sequence with over 40 vehicles being destroyed. Only 10 percent of the action sequences in the film were computer-generated, and even then, much of the CGI was employed simply to erase the wires and other contraptions that were used to film real cars and drivers or to add a background. It took more than 3,500 man-days to complete the various stunts of the film. For safety reasons, stunt coordinator, Joel Kramer said that he doesn't let his drivers go above 50 miles per hour. Redevelopment of Walker's character }} In January 2014, Time reported that Walker's character, Brian O'Conner, would be retired instead of killed, and that new scenes would be developed in order to allow the franchise to continue without him. In March 2014, the Daily News reported that the studio had hired four actors with bodies similar to Walker's physique, and that his face and voice would be computer-generated, and in April 2014, Walker's brothers Caleb and Cody, both of whom closely resemble him, were chosen as stand-ins. For scenes which required re-creating Walker's face and body, the team hired Peter Jackson's Weta Digital (which produced the imagery of Gollum in ''The Lord of the Rings'' franchise and Caesar in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes). The final film includes a combination of CGI and the use of carefully chosen camera angles and lighting using Walker's brothers to simulate his appearance. Robin Shenfield, CEO of London's special effects studio, The Mill, noted that the redevelopment was similar to that of Oliver Reed's when his character had to be redeveloped the same way as a result of his death during filming of Gladiator.